What does it happen with the magnetosphere during the inversion of the magnetic poles?
Tere Universum Science Museum in Mexico City ANSWER: Nobody knows how a pole reversal is actually going to happen: does the magnetic field just turn off, and then turn on again with reverse polarity? Does the pole start moving towards the equator and then up (or down, depending on your point of view) towards the other side? What we can say about magnetospheres in these two scenarios comes from observations of other planets. Venus, for example, has no magnetic field, but a dense atmosphere. We can see that such a planet has an ionosphere with some very strange and very weak aurora all over the dark hemisphere, but there is no magnetosphere. Uranus, on the other hand, has a magnetic field such that the magnetic pole is on the equator, so we can see what the magnetosphere in such a situation looks like. What we have there is a twisted magnetosphere that changes very rapidly over the course of a day. The aurora on Uranus is also very strange, strongest during high noon, and best seen at th
